Provisioning Internet, television, and telephone services to residential and commercial customers traditionally requires a service provider to configure and provide equipment such as set-top boxes (“STBs”), modems, voice over Internet protocol (“VoIP”) adapters, and other gateway devices. Oftentimes, these devices require the customer or a technician to install and configure them on customer premises.
Conventional gateway devices come with pre-loaded firmware or otherwise with some other pre-loaded configuration by the service provider or manufacturer. Once installed, the devices' functions are limited so as to only be practicably used in their purpose-specific capacity as a residential or commercial gateway device. As a result, the gateway devices have limited upgradability, and in many situations, cannot be used between different service providers or to receive different types of services. This forces the customer to use multiple fixed-function service devices to receive upgraded or additional services, or alternatively for the customer to replace older equipment altogether.
Furthermore, as consumer devices increasingly become interconnected over “the Internet of Things,” these “smart” devices often require additional fixed-function devices or components to enable their smart functionality. For example, smart devices can include any device (which may have smart functionality incorporated therein), including, but not limited to, health monitoring devices such as heart monitoring implants, appliances, utility meters, automobiles, thermostats, alarms and sensors, power plugs and sockets, and home and commercial security systems. Each of these devices utilizes different applications and/or interfaces for communication and also relies on different communications protocols.
Hence, there is a need for an adaptive solution to configuring and provisioning services via gateway devices, while also expanding the capability and functionality of gateway devices beyond their fixed-function implementations. In particular, a system is needed for automatically configuring a gateway device capable of activating multiple services using different technologies on different service provider networks.